after the dissolution of the Latin empire, and the extinction of the Imperial power in Rome--and the cause why the Bishop of Constantinople, with all imaginable good wishes and disposition frank declaration of what I think. Well, then! I have no faith in his prophesyings; small sympathy with his fulminations; and in certain peculiarities of his theological system as distinct from his religious principles I can not see my way. But I hold, withal, and not the less firmly for these discrepancies in our moods and judgments, that Edward Irving possesses more of the spirit and purposes of the first Reformers; that he has more of the head and heart, the life, the unction, and the genial power of Martin Luther than any man now alive; yea, than any man of this and the last century. I see in Edward Irving a minister of Christ after the order of Paul; and if the points, in which I think him either erroneous, or excessive and out of bounds, have been at any time a subject of serious regret with me, this regret has arisen principally or altogether from the apprehension of their narrowing the sphere of his influence, from the too great probability that they may furnish occasion or pretext for withholding or withdrawing many from those momentous truths, which the age especially needs, and for the enforcement of which he hath been so highly and especially gifted. Finally, my friend's intellect is too instinct with life, too potential, to remain stationary; and assuming, as every satisfied believer must be supposed to do, the truth of my own views, I look forward with confident hope to a time when his soul shall have perfected her victory over the dead letter of the senses and its apparitions in the sensuous understanding; when the halcyon Ideas shall have alit on the surging sea of his conceptions, Which then shall quite forget to rave, While birds of calm sit brooding on the charmed wave. But to return from the personal, for which I have little taste at any time, and the contrary when it stands in any connection with myself;-in order to the removal of one main impediment to the spiritual resuscitation of the Church it seems to me indispensable that in freedom and unfearing faith, with that courage which can not but flow from the inward and life-like assurance, that neither death, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord, the rulers of our Church and our teachers of theology should meditate and draw the obvious, though perhaps unpalatable, inferences from the following two or three plain truths :—First, that Christ, the Spirit of Truth, has promised to be with his Church even to the end-secondly, that Christianity was described as a tree to be raised from the seed, so described by Him who brought the seed from Heaven and first sowed it :-lastly,-that in the process of evolution there are in every plant growths of transitory use and duration. "The integuments of the seed, having fulfilled their destined office of protection, burst and decay. After the leaves have unfolded, the cotyledons, that had performed their functions, wither and drop off." The husk is a genuine growth of 1 Smith's Introduction to Botany. to do the same, could never raise the Patriarchate of the Greek empire into a Papacy. The Bishops of the other Rome became the slaves of the Ottoman, the moment they ceased to be the subjects of the Emperor. I will now proceed to the Second Part, intended as a humble aid to a just appreciation of the measure, which under the auspices of Mr. Peel and the Duke of Wellington is now the law of the land. This portion of the volume was written while the measure was yet in prospectu; before even the particular clauses of the Bill were made public. It was written to explain and vindicate my refusal to sign a petition against any change in the scheme of law and policy established at the Revolution. But as the arguments are in no respect affected by this circumstance ; nay, as their constant reference to, and dependence on, one fixed general principle, which will at once explain both why I find the actual Bill so much less objectionable than I had feared, and yet so much less complete and satisfactory than I had wished, will be rendered more striking by the reader's consciousness that the arguments were suggested by no wish or purpose either of attacking or supporting any particular measure; it has not been thought necessary or advisable to alter the form. Nay, if I am right in my judgment that the Act lately passed, if characterized by its own contents and capabilities, really is-with or without any such intention on the part of its framers-a stepping-stone, and nothing more; whether to the subversion or to the more perfect establishment of the Constitution in Church and State, must be determined by other causes;-the Act in itself being equally fit for either, and offering the same facilities of transit to both friend and foe, though with a foreclosure to the first comer;—if this be a right, as it is my sincere judgment and belief, there is a propriety in retaining the language of anticipation. Mons adhuc parturit: the ridiculus mus was but an omen. the staff of life; yet we must separate it from the grain. It is, therefore, the cowardice of faithless superstition, if we stand in greater awe of the palpable interpolations of vermin; if we shrink from the removal of excrescences that contain nothing of nobler parentage than maggots of moth or chafer. Let us cease to confound oak-apples with acorns; still less, though gilded by the fashion of the day, let us mistake them for golden pippins or renates.1 1 The fruit from a pippin grafted on a pippin, is called a rennet, that is, renate (re-natus) or twice-born. PART II.; OR, AIDS TO A RIGHT APPRECIATION OF THE ACT ADMITTING ROMAN CATHOLICS TO SIT IN BOTH HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT. ̓Αμέλει, μὰ τὸν Δί' οὐκ ἐνασπιδώσομαι· ἀνὴρ ἀλαζὼν, καὶ δίκαια κᾄδικα· κανταῦθα λανθάνουσ ̓ ἀπεμπολώμενοι. Aristoph. Acharn. 367, &c. (leviter mutata.) I ESTIMATE the beauty and benefit of what is called " a harmony in fundamentals, and a conspiration in the constituent parts of the body politic," as highly as any one. If I met a man who should deny that an imperium in imperio was in itself an evil, I would not attempt to reason with him he is too ignorant. Or if, conceding this, he should deny that the Romish Priesthood in Ireland does in fact constitute an imperium in imperio, I yet would not argue the matter with him: for he must be a bigot. But my objection to the argument is, that it is nothing to the purpose. And even so with regard to the arguments grounded on the dangerous errors and superstitions of the Romish Church. They may be all very true; but they are nothing to the purpose. Without any loss they might pair off with "the heroes of Trafalgar and Waterloo," and "our Catholic ancestors, to whom we owe our Magna Charta," on the other side. If the prevention. of an evil were the point in question, then indeed! But the day of prevention has long passed by. The evil exists rope, sword, nor sermon, neither suppression nor conversion, can remove it. Not that I think slightingly of the last; but even those who hope more sanguinely than I can pretend to do respecting the effects ultimately to result from the labors of missionaries, the dispersion of controversial tracts, and whatever other lawful means and implements it may be in our power to employ--even these must admit that if the remedy could cope with the magnitude and inveteracy of the disease, it is wholly inadequate to the urgency of the symptoms. In this instance it would be no easy matter to take the horse to the water; and the rest of the proverb you know. But why do I waste words There is and can be but one question: and there is and can be but one way of stating it. A great numerical majority of the inhabitants of one integral part of the realm profess a religion hostile to that professed by the majority of the whole realm : and a religion, too, which the latter regard, and have good reason and neither |